What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe? The latest issue of Chimurenga provides alternatives to prevailing educational pedagogy. Through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as it’s opposite.
Inside: Amiri Baraka waxes poetic on the theoretics of Be-Bop; Coco Fusco flips the CIA’s teaching manual for female torturers; Karen Press and Steve Coleman instruct in folk-dancing; Dambudzo Marechera proposes a “guide to the earth”; Dominique Malaquais designs the museum we won’t build; through self-portraits Phillip Tabane and Johnny Dyani offer method to the Skanga (black music family); and Winston Mankunku refuses to teach.
Other contributors include Binyavanga Wainaina, Akin Adesokan, Isoje Chou, Sean O’Toole, Pradid Krishen, E.C. Osundu, Salim Washington, Sefi Atta, Ed Pavlic, Neo Muyanga, Henri-Michel Yere, Medu Arts Ensemble, Aryan Kaganof, Khulile Nxumalo and Walter Mosley amongst others. Cover by Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani.
Chimurenganyana: Forest Notebooks by Mario Lewis (April, 2025)
"How could my art, born from an intimate engagement with ecology, exist within a system that so often exploits the very land it depends on? This tension is unresolved, a friction I carry with me... Forest Notebooks is not an escape from these questions but a confrontation with them. It is an attempt to transcend the traditional boundaries of art and knowledge production, to forge a practice that contributes to human development, empowerment, and ecological consciousness. The forest taught me that growth is not linear, that belonging is not ownership, and that true creativity emerges not in isolation but in reciprocity." -- Mario Lewis, "The forest as teacher" from Forest Notebooks.
Mario Lewis's Forest Notebooks is part of "Black Echologies", a new series of practice-based notebooks produced by Chimurenga in collaboration with Nyabinghi Lab, to challenge mainstream ecological discourse—its coloniality and exclusion of indigenous knowledge. Through this series, we invite thinkers, artists and communities to share intuitions, visions and reflections from their own land, air, or water-based practice.
Mario Lewis is an artist and educator based in Saint James, Trinidad and Tobago. His current work centres on agricultural sustainability, agroforestry, methods which focus on returning the land to its natural state, and on exploring opportunities through the Forest Notebooks International Residency—an artist exchange program.
Size: 188mm x 245mm
Pages: 113pp (plus cover)
Printing: blue, black and red, with illustrations, Munken Pure 90gsm with Risograph
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-0672227-9-6